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What Safeway Does With Its Cash

Cash is king. What a company does with it matters.

In the quest to find great investments, most investors focus on earnings to gauge a company's financial strength. This is a good start, but earnings can be misleading and incomplete. To get a clearer understanding of a company's ability to earn money and reward you, the shareholder, it's often better to focus on cash flow. In this series, we tear apart a company's cash flow statement to see how much money is truly being earned and, more importantly, what management is doing with that cash.

Step on up, Safeway(NYSE: SWY).

The first step in analyzing cash flow is to look at net income. Safeway's net income over the last five years has been all over the place:

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

Normalized Net Income

$579 million

$596 million

$684 million

$966 million

$887 million

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

Next we add back in a few non-cash expenses, like the depreciation of assets, and adjust net income for changes in inventory, accounts receivable, and accounts payable -- changes in cash levels that reflect a company either paying its bills or being paid by customers. This yields a figure called "cash from operating activities" -- the amount of cash a company generates from doing everyday business.

From there we subtract capital expenditures, or the amount a company spends acquiring or fixing physical assets. This yields one version of a figure called "free cash flow," or the true amount of cash a company has left over for its investors after doing business:

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

Free Cash Flow

$929 million

$1 billion

$1.7 billion

$655 million

$422 million

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

Now we know how much cash Safeway is really pulling in each year. Next question: What is it doing with that cash?

There are two ways a company can use free cash flow to directly reward shareholders: dividends and share repurchases. Cash not returned to shareholders can be stashed in the bank, invested in other companies and assets, or used to pay off debt.

Here's how much Safeway has returned to shareholders in recent years:

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

Dividends

$188 million

$168 million

$153 million

$132 million

$112 million

Share Repurchases

$1.6 billion

$621 million

$885 million

$360 million

$226 million

Total Returned to Shareholders

$1.7 billion

$789 million

$1.0 billion

$492 million

$338 million

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

As you can see, the company has repurchased a decent amount of its own stock. That's caused shares outstanding to fall:

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

Shares Outstanding (millions)

343

378

413

434

440

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

Now, companies tend to be fairly poor at repurchasing their own shares, buying feverishly when shares are expensive and backing away when they're cheap. Does Safeway fall into this trap? Let's take a look:

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

Pretty good! Safeway's buybacks have ramped up as shares have fallen. That's what you want to see. Given valuations, these buybacks have likely been a good deal for shareholders.

Finally, I like to look at how dividends have added to total shareholder returns:

Source: S&P Capital IQ.

Shares returned -40% over the last five years, which increases to -34% with dividends reinvested -- a small boost on top of otherwise poor performance.

To gauge how well a company is doing, keep an eye on the cash. How much a company earns is not as important as how much cash is actually coming in the door, and how much cash is coming in the door isn't as important as what management actually does with that cash. Remember, you, the shareholder, own the company. Are you happy with the way management has used Safeway's cash? Sound off in the comment section below.